He didn't know the half of it.
Posted on 06/06/2013 4:46:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
I was thinking the other day about recent US Presidents who were veterans. Harry Truman was a WW-I vet, but Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon (USN), LBJ (USN) and Bush 41 were all WW-II veterans. Jimmy Carter served in the Navy and Bush 43 was in the National Guard and was a fighter pilot. Only Clinton and Obama have had no military experience whatsoever.
The perfect examples of WW II “Greatest Generation” politicians are the Kennedys. They thought America could do anything. Win wars, fight for democracy abroad, eliminate poverty and hunger. So the established programs and followed policies to do these things. Well, guess what. America can’t do everything. The idea that poverty and hunger can be eliminated is a dangerous fantasy. It set us up for where we are now — half the country paying no taxes and expecting a bunch of government benes to be paid for by the “rich.”
I was not referring specifically to Lautenberg.
No disrespect, but WW II vets should have made their exit from politics a long time ago.
Haven’t we learned our lesson from allowing guys like Robert Byrd to hang around and hold seats of power when they are in a semi-vegetative state?
He didn't know the half of it.
Good point. I read an interesting article about that very same thing. The author said that it was, in a way, unfortunate that the US won WW II as decisively as it did.
Because WW II gave the US the foolish belief that it simply could not fail at anything it attempted to do.
From unionizing government, to Vietnam, to the 1965 Immigration Act, JFK was the end of us.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
Isn’t though about one fourth of the military hard-core leftist?
Many good comments posted here. Perhaps some of our best from the Greatest Generation are not the ones that returned but the ones that didn’t, the ones that gave it all. Who knows what our country would have looked like if most of those 400,000 had not had to die. I think it will be up to future generations or historians to pass more unbiased judgement on the so called Greatest Generation. I know I have had mixed feelings about them like many have expressed here. One thing from a spiritual perspective is that God tends to use wars to discipline nations. The 20th century was a disaster for America. I wonder if we responded appropriately to his warnings to us. In many ways it looks like we never really recovered from the Civil War and things just went down hill ever since. You have to go back to almost the beginning of the 1900’s to find one of the great revivals in America that tended to change the culture of the day. I think it was around 1914 that there was a religious revival of such intensity that all business in Chicago shut down for an hour at noon so all the employees could go to their respective places of worship to pray. Can you even imagine that happening today? We seem to have gotten more and more godless and our government seems to have grown ever larger and our morality has sank to the point of where it is today - nonexistent. Great article posted today by Larry Elder on the decline of the family and out-of-wedlock birth rates. Since the late 50’s the family in America has all but been destroyed. I both grieve and fear for our once great nation. Whatever your persuasion, it seems we can not go on the way we are. There will be some kind of correction and I think we all know it won’t be good.
Bob Dole made this point in his “debate” in Houston with Walter F. Mondale in 1976, and the argument was repudiated by the American people. Dole had to apologize and admit that FDR was one of “my heroes”.
Arguably, WW2 was also cleaned up by a Republican - General Eisenhower, before he was in office.
It is no coincidence that Clinton and Obama have shown the greatest contempt of those who serve of any U.S. Presidents.
Well played, m'lady. :)
How are you doing? Hope all is well!
Had Romney won he would have had no military experience either. It's very likely that we've seen our last veteran president from either party, certainly for the foreseeable future. I can't think of any of the current crop of GOP potential candidate who served. And certainly none of the Dems.
Hey, don’t come after me because you had problems with your daddy. My father was a Republican, anti-Communist Conservative Catholic who did time in a Japanese prison of war camp. A great guy who I miss more every day.
Better than I can stand. It's proof you can eak out a happy existence even in a neo-socialist fascist police state. lol
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